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Three months before 41-year-old Guang Hua Liu was violently killed and her body parts discarded around the GTA, she began a relationship with a former customer at the massage parlour she once worked at, a Brampton court heard Friday.

Kenneth Grotsky, a 52-year-old architect, reported Liu missing to the police on Aug. 11, 2012, sparking a search that ended in tragedy.

Liu’s on-and-off boyfriend Chun Qi Jiang is now on trial for murdering Liu, dismembering her body, and discarding various parts in Scarborough and Mississauga.

Grotsky, a slim man wearing thick-rimmed glasses, a grey blazer and black jeans, testified that he met Liu at a Scarborough massage parlour in October 2010. He became a regular customer, visiting almost every week, and after several months Liu began giving him a “happy ending” to the massages, he told the court.

During that time Grotsky was in a long-standing same-sex relationship, but in Feburary 2012 when Liu was gone on a five-week trip to China he began to realize that he had romantic feelings for her.

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“I finally realized the feeling I had were those that a man had for a woman,” he said. “It was very, very strange having lived life as an openly gay male . . . I realized I was attracted to her, in love with her.”

On April 11, 2012 he went to the spa only to learn Liu no longer worked there. He asked if he could leave her a letter there and did so the next day.

“Hua contacted with to my great delight within hours of me dropping that letter off,” he said. He asked her out and they began dating.

Liu was in the process of opening her own spa, and Grotsky helped her negotiate a lease extension on the store — something he now regrets, he said.

“I wish I’d relayed the intensity of my feelings before the closing of the sale, that complicated our relationship very much,” he explained in cross-examination.

With their feelings progressing “extraordinarily rapidly,” Grotsky told the court he asked Liu to give up the business, stop communicating with her former customers and move in with him at his home in Port Hope.

He paid off her lines of credit, a total of $16,000, and began paying her rent on both her home and the store until it could be sold. By the time of her death, he’d given her about $27,000, he told the court.

She moved in with him on June 22, but on July 31 she packed up and returned to her Scarborough townhouse after Grotsky raised some “nagging issues” with their relationship.

“My heart was fighting with my more rational side,” he said. He wanted Liu to break away from her “ethically challenged” circle of friends. They had also been discussing having a child and he expressed concern about her mothering abilities.

“If I could relive that day I would,” he said.

The Crown has said that Liu spent two nights after the break-up with Jiang, and was supposed to spend a third night with him before cancelling, as the relationship with Grotsky rekindled.

The night before Liu disappeared was a “fantastic” one for Grotsky and Liu, Grotsky told the court.

“I’m not sure how to describe this . . . we felt something for one another . . . a closeness I’ve never felt in my 52 years,” he said, his voice breaking. “She said: ‘Yes, I feel it Ken. For the first time I know how much you love me.’ ”

He told the court that Liu didn’t trust men. She had been loath to tell him about her eldest son who lived with her and never told him about her two other sons from a second marriage because she thought men didn’t like women with children, he said.

The jury has seen a police interview with Jiang where he says he stopped wanting a relationship with Liu after he learned she had a son.

Grotsky and Liu made plans to go to San Francisco where Liu’s sister lived, to pay her back $10,000 she still owed from when she moved to Canada, he told the court.

Grotsky left on the morning of Aug. 10 to take care of some matters in Port Hope. It was the last time he saw Liu, he testified.

He first became concerned about her safety when she didn’t reply to text messages in the evening which she usually does instantly, he told the court.

He drove back to Toronto that night, hoping to find her at her home, he said. But he only found her 21-year-old son who didn’t know where Liu was. Her glasses, contact lens case and car were all still at her home, adding to his concern.

He learned from one of Liu’s friends that she had been with Jiang that evening, he said.

He’d seen Jiang twice before but Liu only told him he was a “work friend.” He did not learn they had been in a romantic relationship until the next morning when he reported Liu missing to the police, he testified.

As the search for Liu continued, he began texting and calling Jiang, asking him to pass on a message to Liu, pleading with her to just let him know she was safe, he said.

Meanwhile, the police suggested that Liu had run off with his money to avoid paying him, something he has never thought, he told the court.

Jiang told police in an interview that Liu took money from a white man that she was dating and didn’t plan to return it, suggesting the man as a possible suspect.

After being questioned by Jiang’s lawyer Kathryn Wells about whether he knew if Liu provided sexual gratification to other patrons at the spa and whether the business she planned to open would be similar, Grotsky said he did not know and noted that Liu also had a second job at a garment factory where she sewed collars onto shirt for four cents each.

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